The Wall Paintings in the Palace at Varakhsha | Th...

Above this frieze is another, a procession of animals of which only the lower portion survives. Such organization into horizontal registers is similar to that of the wall paintings excavated at Panjikent in the Samarkand oasis, but the subject matter of the main register is unique in the arts of Central Asia.

For an interpretation of the palace’s architecture and reconstructions of both the Blue and Red Halls, see Boris I. Marshak [Marschak/Maršak], “The Ceilings of the Varakhsha Palace,” Parthica 2 (2000): 153–67. For a reconstruction of the Red Hall in cross-section, see 165, fig. 13.

Dressed in loose-fitting dhoti pants, flowing scarf, and turban, the bare-chested elephant rider suggests the chief Vedic or Hindu deity Indra (also a Buddhist guardian deity), whose vehicle is the elephant. Given the syncretic nature of Sogdian religion, it is also quite possible that he is Adhvagh, the Sogdian version of the supreme Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda.

For a fuller discussion of the rider’s identification and the difficulties of recognizing Ahura Mazda in Sogdian visual culture, see Michael Shenkar, Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the Pre-Islamic Iranian World. Series, Magical and Religious Literature of Late Antiquity, vol. 4 (Leiden and Boston: Brill 1974), 63–65. Shishkin had posited that the painting represented the struggle of Good (the hero) against Evil (the felines and dragon), a concept underlying Mazdean beliefs.

As for the rider’s elephant, it is clear that the artists had never seen a real one. It is clumsily depicted, with a disproportionately small head and short legs. Further evidence of the artist’s unfamiliarity with the animal is that its tusks are shown growing from its lower jaw.

Such inaccuracies did not matter, however, to the person who painstakingly cut separate images from the painting before demolition of the hall’s roof in the mid-8th century. From his careful examination of the Red Hall during its reexcavation in 1987, numismatist/archaeologist Aleksandr Naymark suggested that those images served as artists’ models, thereby passing on Sogdian artistic tradition; Fig. 2.

“These cuts seem to be the result of very accurate and time-consuming work aimed at the removal of wall fragments with an intact painted surface. Since each cut concentrated on a certain compact element of images, like the head of a man or the wing of a griffin, these cuts are very likely to be done by an artist who used this opportunity to obtain samples of superior work for his pattern collection from the paintings destined for inevitable destruction. This unusual fact provides us with a rare insight into one of the mechanisms that allowed the elements of pre-Islamic artistic tradition to be passed to the art of the early Islamic period.” Alexandr Naymark [Naimark], “Returning to Varakhsha,” Silk Road Foundation Newsletter 1, no. 2 (December 2003): 32.